Samuel Frid and Joanne Tod's My Father, Bob and I

At the last years of the 20th century Charles Campbell, a former Editor of the Georgia Straight was working at the Vancouver Sun. He created a page called Rear Window especially for moi so that I could write and illustrate with my photographs stuff I had done in the past.

I had forgotten this one until I was rummaging through my files looking for something I could write about. Now that it is 2026 I feel completely out of place as the change I observe is not to my liking.

I received an email from a friend who is an editor for a weekly periodical on an obvious decline. I had sent him/her an email about 3 weeks ago. It was answered yesterday thusly: Sorry I didn’t get the chance to respond. I currently have 18, 458 emails in my inbox. Ninety % of them are unopened, partly because all of us are having trouble grinding things out with a skeleton staff.

Because the periodical does not have a phone or a receptionist communication is only through emails.

This particular Rear Window is dear to me (even though I had forgotten it) as the painting by Joanne Tod is a definite Christmas one with the delightfully confusing title. Is Bob the name of the little boy’s mother? The painting was also the favourite of my red-haired Mexican friend, Samuel Fridd who at the time had a gallery called the Threshold.

When I called the VAG and asked them If I could see this painting again they answered, “We are not going to put it up on the wall just for you.”

Sempervivum tectorum 20 March 2026

Hen and chicks (also known as hen-and-chickens, or hen-widdies in the southern United States) is a common name for a group of small succulent plants. They belong to the flowering plant family Crassulaceae, native to southern Europe and northern Africa. The plants grow close to the ground with leaves formed around each other in a rosette, and propagating by offsets. The "hen" is the main, or mother, plant, and the "chicks" are a flock of offspring,[1] which start as tiny buds on the main plant and soon sprout their own roots, taking up residence close to the mother plant.

Plants commonly referred to as "Hens and chicks" include ground-hugging species of Sempervivum (houseleeks) such as Sempervivum 'Pekinese', S. arachnoideum (cobweb houseleek), and S. tectorum (common houseleek), as well as members of the related genus Jovibarba. The name is also used for some species of Echeveria, Sedum and Bergenia although these plants differ significantly from Sempervivum and Jovibarba, and may require different cultivation and care. Wikipedia

Today in spite of the weather prediction it is a sunny day. I am not going in my bike. I may have a big excuse. My male cat Niño had his teeth cleaned Tuesday morning. They put him to sleep for this. So he has been barely able to walk. He refuses to eat or drink. I am taking him to the vet tomorrow for check-up. So I am cat sitting Niño mostly on my bed.

I did notice my pot of hens and chicks so I decided to scan one of the florets. The colours are happy colours. I can almost smile. Rosemary would have noticed them days before. She would approve of my scan.

Tarren

These days I tell people that I have no interest in women except for my Rosemary who died five years ago. I do welcome dialogue with women as I see them as distinctly different from me as I am a man. In this I also include people who are not of that tradition of women/men. If a trans woman thinks she is a man I accept it. Gay men are men for me.

Since I photographed my Rosemary nude in 1969 (one year after we married) I pursued the taking of photographs of women not wearing much or anything at all. I was looking for the ultimate image that would define eroticism.

Rosemary 1969

Now I stare at framed photograph of Rosemary in my bedroom and I can imagine that moment when she faced my camera. For 52 years we were companions in bed and out of bed. She never did dissuade me from taking all those photographs of so many women.

Now I can look at my photographs and memories of Rosemary and I can truthfully state that she was a perfect woman.

Because I am a Platonist:

A Platonist is a philosopher or adherent who believes that abstract objects—such as numbers, mathematical entities, and ideal forms (e.g., beauty, justice)—exist in a non-physical, non-mental realm independent of human thought and space-time. Based on Plato’s teachings, they view the physical world as an imperfect, changing reflection of these eternal, unchanging truths. Wikipedia

And Rosemary might have been one too, we believed that the quickest cure to the sadness of the loss of a dead cat was to get immediately a new one. Never was that new cat a kitten. We liked to adopt a middle-aged on as learning to mutually get along was part of the fun.

How is this Platonic? I believe that the new cat inherits from the dead cat that perfect form that I call “catness”. A bit of the dead cat shows up in the new one.

The closest I have arrived at this idea with humans and particularly with women (womaness?) is in my observation into the countless photographs that I have on women. One simply stands out. I began to photograph Tarren around 1979 and I have been taking photographs of her until most recently. She has a perfect body (in my eyes) but there is something more in her face and how she looks at my camera.

While I have stated above that I am no longer interested women except for my gone Rosemary, I could be wrong. There is something comforting in looking at my photographs of that perfect woman that is Tarren.

Often in these blogs I quote my grandmother who told me that the devil knows more not because he is the devil but because he is an old man.

Back in that century and until my abuelita died in 1970 she was my mentor and I worshipped her. But now in this century anything old except is seen as suspect. Except perhaps antique cars, antiques and pristine but very old cameras that gearheads spend loads of money on. The relationship I had with my grandmother I do not have with my two granddaughters.

Since 2001 I have been scanning the plants of my garden. I call these over 3000 of them scanographs and I tell people I am a scanographer. When they look at my large framed ones and tell me how they like the photograph they immediately lose interest when I tell them that they are scanographs.

About five years ago I discovered the astounding possibilities of scanning (my Epson V700) two b+w negs, colour negs and slides together. The results are especially good when the chosen sandwiches (that’s what I call them) are from the same session.

Katheryn was one of the finest women I ever photographed for a span of several years. I have thousands of her pictures from the 16 sessions we had in my studio, UBC forest, West Van Lighthouse Park, Marble Arch Hotel Room 615, Wreck Beach and my bathtub. Today I decided to look at her pictures and I did these three sandwiches.

Because I am an old man of 83 I realize I don’t have too much time left to pursue these sandwiches.

Am I full?

It was in Malcolm Parry’s Vancouver Magazine office that I remember telling him sometime in 1977 that I was fascinated in taking photographs of nude women on Wreck Beach. In his wisdom, Parry just smiled. I wonder now that he is almost 90 what his opinion would be of my journey with female body photography has taken me to. Is there anything beyond today?

One of my first subjects was a delightfully lovely ecdysiast called Shelina. She posed for me at the beach and I even took those photographs with sea spray. Are they clichés?

Some many years later at an ecdysiast reunion at the Number 5 Orange Club, Shelina told me, “Alex, just for you I am now going to dance.” This she did and I will never forget how special I felt.

Then even more years later I contacted Shelina and she invited me to her home. By now she was plainly not going to take any of her clothes off. I took these photographs of her behind a semi-transparent door with the then available Polaroid film.

I like that transition from beginning to end. Is this the end of my efforts to photograph the nude female form? What would Malcolm Parry say?